Single Player Tarkov, the unofficial offline version of extraction shooter pillar Escape from Tarkov, is shutting down after the development team received a trademark violation notice from creator Battlestate Games.
A notice announcing an end to work on SPT was posted to the game mode's official Discord server on August 1. SPT been around for years, gradually iterating on the promise of "a fully offline experience – no more server downtime, cheaters, or forced PvP."
Senior moderator DrakiaXYZ explains that Battlestate sent a notice and, shortly afterward, "certain users have decided to leak internal communications and push their own narrative as if it were the truth and final outcome, so we are forced to make an announcement before we were ready, and before a final decision was made about what we plan to do with all parts of the project."
Putting it clearly, they add, "This is the end of the SPT Project under the current team, and in its current form. However all of the source code will remain available if a future team wishes to continue from where we left off."
While "this leak has played a large part in the decisions that staff and maintainers have made in regards to this trademark violation notice," per DrakiaXYZ, it is not what forced the team to shutdown SPT outright.
Another SPT staff member, RaiRaiTheRaichu, writes in a follow-up post: "Leaks' are not the reason why SPT is not continuing development, 'leaks' are why the Github organization is not being directly passed on to anyone."
Many users reacted with confusion, wondering why the SPT team, in the absence of an actual cease and desist order from Battlestate, doesn't simply remove any mentions of the Tarkov name from the project.
RaiRaiTheRaichu affirms that SPT update 4.1, released just days ago, "has always been the intended last version of SPT from us." Additionally, the project cannot continue, they say, because "it is not as simple as 'just rehost it'/'just change the name,' also not as simple as 'give the website to someone else' – partly because why the heck are we going to hand over your passwords, DMs, emails, etc. to anybody."
A third Discord message from SPT lead Refringe, who says they were "personally sent the legal notice," hammers one final nail in the coffin.
"The plan right from the start was always for another team to pick up where we left off," Refringe writes. "That's why I packaged up all the GitHub repositories, including their history and issues, and shared with everyone on the staff and development team. It's also why I intend to keep sharing whatever data I can morally justify handing over (excluding anything involving user information) with people I trust to carry this forward responsibly."
Future development and availability for Single Player Tarkov is tough to make out through the legal and community drama in the air. It doesn't appear that the fan game mode will up and disappear – if only in the sense that nothing ever truly leaves the internet once posted, as plenty of people already have this offline mode installed and backed up – but there's no telling if or when it will find new shepherds, and I don't see a change of hands magically resolving Battlestate's complaint.
